Understand Fat Loss

Stabilizing blood sugar is one of the nine golden rules for fat loss.

To understand this better, let’s look into how sugar regulation works.

Your body’s goal is to maintain a constant glycemic blood content (stable blood sugar). It is very well equiped to achieve this (if it wasn’t, we would not be here).

After a meal, which typically contain carbohydrates, glucose that results from digestion is absorbed by the bloodstream, raising blood sugar levels. This is detected by the hypothalamus (part of the brain) that sends messages to the pancreas, causing it to release insulin. Insulin causes any cell in your body that can use or store sugar to absorb it from the bloodstream.

All cells use glucose to function, but some stand out because they are capable of storing it for later use. These cells are:
- liver cells that store glucose in the form of glycogen (this is one of the causes of fake weight gain or loss).
- Muscle cells also store glucose in the form of glycogen. The difference with liver cells is that they can only use the glycogen themselves, while liver cells are capable of making the glycogen storage available to the entire body by releasing it when needed. Type II muscle cells have much more storage capacity than type I muscle cells do.
- Fat cells store sugar as fat.

So insulin causes downward regulation of blood sugar levels by causing glucose to be stored or absorbed for immediate use. Upward regulation mechanisms are triggered when blood sugar levels are depleting, which is also detected by the hypothalamus. In this case, the pancreas is instructed to release glucagon, which targets the liver cells. This is a hormonal message that instructs the hepatic cells to disassemble glycogen and release the resulting glucose into the bloodstream.

Glucagon and insulin usually work great at regulating and stabilizing blood sugar levels, which otherwise would vary according to meals and physical activity. That is unless a medical condition such as diabetes arises, which either makes it impossible to produce insulin (type I), or impairs your body’s cells’ ability to absorb the sugar in the bloodstream (type II).

So why do you need to act to stabilize blood sugar yourself?

Normally, you shouldn’t have to, but then there is diabetes, a pre-diabetic condition called resistance to insulin, and addiction to sugar that come into play because… Your sugar regulation mechanisms aren’t necessarily perfect, and if they are, they don’t stay that way forever.

1. Diabetes has two forms. Type I hits patients at a young age (increasingly young unfortunately). If you do not have it by the time you are an adult, chances are you never will. But type I diabetes only represents about 10% of diabetes patients, and is largely due to genetic inheritance. Type II diabetes typically hits in the 40’s (but unfortunately stats show it is rising in younger populations as well). With age, your cellular ability to respond to insulin wears down, until eventually blood sugar levels depend mostly on meals for upward regulation and physical activity for downward regulation. Physical activity is made much more difficult by the fact that sugar has a very hard time entering the cells when they need it. 8% of the US population have type II diabetes, which was declared a national epidemic in the early 2000’s.

2. Resistance to insulin is a pre-diabetic condition because it can largely be described as a mild form of type II diabetes. Sugar has a hard time entering the body’s cells, but not yet quite as hard as they would if type II diabetes was declared. MANY people have more or less advanced resistance to insulin. The most prominent symptom is lack of energy and drowsiness after meals. Resistance to insulin can and must be attended to.
- discuss it with a physician.
- stabilize blood sugar (we’ll see why, just in case it isn’t obvious yet, and how).
- include chromium, magnesium and omega-3 essential fatty acids in your diet.
- Vitamin D also helps reduce resistance to insulin.

3. Addiction to sugar comes from sugar cravings that result from sugar lows. Sugar lows in turn come as a result of… sugar highs!
- You eat high carbohydrate foods with high glycemic index (the higher, the faster the sugar ends up in the bloodstream).
- The pancreas reacts with a strong insulin release that causes the glucose to be stored quickly, causing a sugar low.
- A craving for more sugar comes as a result, causing you to eat more high carbohydrate foods with high glycemic index.
- With each repetition of this cycle, the pancreas becomes stronger and releases increasingly strong doses of insulin.
- The more insulin, and the more frequently it is released, the faster the sugar low comes, until your body’s cells grow increasingly immune to insulin (much like it will become immune to any substance that causes a hormonal message to be triggered, like drugs), causing resistance to insulin.
- Each cycle thus strengthens addiction to sugar until resistance to insulin starts settling in, ultimately causing type II diabetes.

Western foods (high glycemic foods such as white sandwich breads, prepackaged foods with high sugar content, insane inventions such as honeyed ham), are increasingly high in sugar content, causing cases of diabetes to increase (over 30% of the overweight population above 40 in the US). Diabetes patients have a much harder time losing fat because they cannot metabolize sugar that doesn’t make it in cells.

So isn’t it time you stabilized blood sugar?

To do so,
1. Replace the high glycemic index foods with low GI carb sources whenever possible (lentils, peas, beans – any type).
2. Eat more fiber (all three types).
3. Drink more water (increases the effectiveness of fiber).

Again, foods you can take to reduce resistance to insulin will include chromium, vitamin D, magnesium and essential fatty acids (either naturally or in the form of supplements. Vitamin D is synthesised by the body, but requires sunlight to do so. If you are stuck indoors all day, or live in an area with cold, dark winters, supplements are recommended. Chromium is a trace element that can be included in multi-vitamin supplements (along with minerals, thus including magnesium).

Read the labels, talk to the drug store clerk (or pharmacist), talk to your doc.